Survey of the Palace of Westminster

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Office of Works
  - London: Palace of Westminster: designs for alterations and additions, 1793-1828 (499)
    - Additional drawings, surveys etc. (44)
      - Surveys of the old Palace of Westminster (13)

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Reference number

SM 37/1/16

Purpose

Survey of the Palace of Westminster

Aspect

Plan of the Buildings adjoining to Westminster Hall and the House of / Parliament as they existed in the Year 1800

Scale

bar scale of 1/4 inch to 10 feet

Inscribed

as above, labelled: Bridge Street, New Palace / Yard, Westminster Hall, Part of Henry / 7th Chapel, Old Palace Yard, Abingdon Street, The River Thames

Medium and dimensions

Pen, black, sepia and blue washes, pricked for transfer within double ruled and black wash border on wove paper (513 x 830)

Hand

Soane Office

Notes

This undated drawing appears to be a copy of SM 37/1/21, both of which are to the same scale, show the same area of Westminster (from the piers of Westminster Bridge to Abingdon Street), combine a plan of the Palace with a block plan of the surrounding buildings, and employ a similar range and use of washes. In addition, this drawing has been pricked for transfer, providing further evidence that it is a copy, if not that a copy has been made from it.

Although an inscription claims that the drawing shows the buildings of the Palace of Westminster "as they existed in the Year 1800", (or more probably the year 1793 if it is a copy), it was probably not made until some time later - perhaps even as late as the 1820s, judging from its condition and quality in execution. The inscriptions, and therefore presumably the drawing itself, are in the hand of George Bailey (1792-1860). Bailey joined the Soane Office as a pupil in 1806* but this drawing shows evidence of a mature hand, implying that it was made later on in his career.

*After completing his articles he then became Soane's assistant and remained at Lincoln's Inn Fields after Soane's death, serving as the first Curator of his Museum from 1837 until 1860.

Tom Drysdale, October 2014

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural, design and topographical drawings which is a very important resource for scholars worldwide. His was the first architect’s collection to attempt to preserve the best in design for the architectural profession in the future, and it did so by assembling as exemplars surviving drawings by great Renaissance masters and by the leading architects in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and his near contemporaries such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam and George Dance the Younger. These drawings sit side by side with 9,000 drawings in Soane’s own hand or those of the pupils in his office, covering his early work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of his architectural practice from 1780 until the 1830s.

Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).